FOR one very solid, very satisfying mo ment, it was possible to be at Citi Field and not wonder if the Mets had gone and allowed architects and planners to completely alter the face of their franchise. The Face, as you know, is David Wright. He does many things very well. One of them is hit home runs.

In the fifth inning last night, with the Mets already trailing 5-2, with the new place already sounding as defeated as the old place did on so many nights the past two years, The Face did something extraordinary: he provided the first real burst of sound the new ballpark had ever seen.

There were two men out and two men on, and if you believe the way a lot of local chatter has gone lately, this is precisely the moment when David Wright turns into David Copperfield, making himself disappear. It may be a silly idea, an absurd one, but it is certainly out there. People talk about it. They wonder.

And then Wright reached down, connected with a Walter Silva breaking ball, and he got it, got it flush, got it pure, sent it high and deep and long and soaring toward the left-field seats. Chase Headley, playing left field, conceded early, choosing to watch rather than chase, because it sure looked and sounded like a home run.

He was right, barely: the ball landed a row or two back in the seats beyond the 364-foot sign and the 19-foot wall. It was a home run, and a clutch one, and it tied the game temporarily before the Mets and their leaky defense would give the lead and the game right back to the Padres, a 6-5 loss that was a fairly thorough buzzkill for what started out to be a hell of a night.

Of course, Wright later came back to the plate in the seventh inning, and by now the Mets were trailing by a run, and this time he sent another rocket out into the night, and in a lot of the new-age ballparks, the one with batter-friendly numbers on the fences, it would have been gone, long gone. Not this one. This one died on the warning track.

Wright didn’t complain. He didn’t give a DiMaggio-like kick to the dust near second base. He jogged back to the dugout, and let the sighs of the crowd of 41,007 do the talking for him. And those sighs said plenty.

“There are some big gaps and some places to go and hit some doubles and triples and I think that’s the kind of mindset you have to bring to the plate here,” Wright said, sounding thoroughly diplomatic. “There are some things you can’t control, and so you just can’t worry about it.”

Let’s face it: it was no accident that Yankee Stadium, when it was built, was constructed with one man in mind. Babe Ruth was a member of the team. He was known to hit long fly balls to right field. And so right field was built so close to home plate that some bleacher creatures could have reached out and shaken Ruth’s hand if they wanted.

They called it the House That Ruth Built, but it was really the House That Was Built For Ruth. And the Babe, make no mistake, appreciated the gesture. Citi? Right now, until proven otherwise, it is the house where fly balls that used to be home runs become F-7s, F-8s and F-9s. There isn’t as much of a ring to that.